WombatNation

I just upgraded to WordPress 2.1 (improvements to the editor on the “Write Post” page alone are worth the time spent on the upgrade) and have run into an issue with get_links(). The first argument to get_links is the category id. If you don’t specify an argument or pass in -1, all links are returned.

I manage the Tutorials, Friends, and Blogroll sections of my sidebar using get_links() to return link info. After upgrading, this stopped working. If I pass in -1, all links are returned, so the functionality isn’t totally broken. But, specify the integer value for the category id no longer seems to work.

It embarrasses me to know that US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales not only attended my alma mater, Rice University, but was actually granted a degree. Throughout his reign of cluelessness in the Attorney General’s office, he has made many statements that have left me cringing and wondering how he can say these things with a straight face.

Robert Parry of the Baltimore Chronicle & Sentinel recently reported that in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on January 18th, Gonzales made the claim that US citizens accused of a crime do not have the right to due process and a fair trial. He made the rather audacious claim that “There is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution; there’s a prohibition against taking it away”. I don’t know what you’re thinking Alberto, but Article I, Section 9, of the Constitution states that “the privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.” You’re splitting some pretty fine hairs if you’re trying to claim that something the Constitution specifically calls out as not being suspended cannot be assumed to be granted.

Committee member Republican Senator Arlen Specter was shocked by the outlandishness of Gonzales’s remarks. Or as Specter put it, “You may be treading on your interdiction of violating common sense.”

But Gonzales’s weasel words are not only rivaling Clinton’s alleged statement about how one defines “is”. Parry points out that Gonzales is probably just wrong. The sixth amendment makes postive statements about granting many of the legal features expressed by habeas corpus.

But then this shouldn’t be a surprise from a man who described the Geneva Convention as “quaint” and “obsolete”, before flip-flopping on his statements when attention was drawn to them. Even then, he suggested that it was fair for the US to choose to make exemptions to this international law.

My brother was recently quoted in several newspaper articles, including one in the Austin American-Statesman, discussing the controversial Texas Universal Service Fund. The fund pays large telecom companies hundreds of millions of dollars per year to provide local phone service to rural customers. The justification for the fund is that the cost to provide phone service in rural areas is so high that few people in those areas could afford the full market rate cost to receive the service. Therefore, phone service subscribers in more urban areas are taxed so as to subsidize the cost of the rural service. Although my brother was primarily interviewed about the Texas Universal Fund, this issue applies to nineteen states.

On the face of it, this fund sounds like a reasonable thing, but there are quite a few catches. As my brother points out in these articles, the telecom companies don’t have to provide any public accounting records to document how they spend the money they receive from the fund. Also, the tax rate was determined many years ago, but the amounts haven’t been adjusted adequately to reflect advances in technology that should have lowered the costs to the telecom companies to provide service to rural areas.

In addition, mobile phone subscribers must also pay this tax, even though it was originally intended to apply to wireline services. In many areas that were declared rural under the original rules, expanding suburbs have made the cost of service cost effective for telecom companies to provide. However, these areas are still counted as rural areas with respect to requiring subsidies. In addition, many rural areas now receive adequate enough mobile telephone service that wireline service may not even be needed.

The San Francisco Chronicle recently ran article by an AP writer with the same basic info, but focused more on the situation in California. California, like Texas and ten other states, requires that mobile phone subscribers pay into the Universal Service Fund.

To make the issue even more confusing, there is also a federal Universal Service Fund that the telecom companies pay into which, in part, is also intended to subsidize the costs of providing phone service to rural areas. Of course, many of the big telecom companies pass on these costs to consumers, including mobile phone subscribers.

In addition to the interviews for these articles, my brother was also interviewed for a news piece that ran on Austin’s 90.5 FM KUT radio station. Go Roger!

Today WSJ Online had a half decent article on speech recognition. The writer provided reasonable coverage of the field, without being too negative. Microsoft continues to help out the whole field by drawing more attention to speech recognition. While Microsoft hasn’t invested quite as much into promoting speech recognition as I had hoped after the debut of Speech Server, what they have done even up to now has still been a big help for us all.
I must beg to differ, though, with the implication of the article’s title “After Years of Effort, Voice Recognition Is Starting to Work”. Speech recognition does work and it has worked for quite some time. No, it’s not perfect and no, it doesn’t work equally well for everyone, but search engines don’t work perfectly for everyone either.

Maybe it’s an unjustified hypothesis on my part, but I think people have learned over time how to better serve themselves on the web by using more meaningful terms in their search queries. Maybe I’m wrong and people can’t be trained through experience, but I think that most people will figure out how to improve the results they get from search engines. Also, with enough experience with using vendors’ websites, people get used to the basic flow of web user interfaces and are better able to serve themselves.

I think the same thing will happen as people get more experience interacting with speech applications. And, without a doubt, people will get more chances every day to do this. At my company, we see every day growing interest in the deployment of speech applications to offer cost effective and good quality customer service. The cost advantage is just too appealing for many merchants and service companies.

“For all of my fascination with the technology of speech recognition, I, too, would rather have a person on the other end;”

I think a decade or so ago people might have said the same thing about interacting with a bank teller instead of an ATM. Or even farther back in time, about having a gas station attendant pump their gas. But there are significat costs in having other people handle these transactions for us, which is why those tasks have been almost completely converted to self service.

There are two obvious reasons that customers will accept self service. Faster and Cheaper. There are more, of course, but these two account for a lot.

Using an ATM instead of waiting in line for a bank teller will almost always be faster, and many banks also now charge for use of a teller. While people often complain about this practice, it’s not exactly novel. Many companies charge more for providing a level of service that costs them more to provide. It costs more to provide first class service on a plane flight, so the airlines charge more. The problem banks had is that they didn’t charge for use of a teller from the beginning. Since using a teller was free, they couldn’t give you a discount for using an ATM without giving away money.

Speech apps can obviously be faster if call centers are understaffed enough to create significant waits. This also isn’t novel. You usually wait in a bank lobby or at an airline checkin counter if you don’t want to use the ATM or kiosk. Supermarkets and hardware stores are even offering self checkout that can allow you to get out of the store faster.

Speech apps can also be cheaper if companies offer discounts for their use. Of course, this only works for revenue producing transactions. Since the easiest transactions to automate don’t produce revenue (store locator, account balance, reservation confirmation), you have to focus on Faster for these transactions when implementing them. But, speech apps that automate purchases could gain greater adoption if consumers were offered better prices or other rewards. Offering rewards for using speech self service can also work for non revenue producing transactions, e.g., airlines sometimes offer frequent flyer miles for online checkin, but you may need to track the rewards to make sure they aren’t abused. Rewarding online checkin works, because you can do it only once per flight.